Posted on 10/26/2006 9:00:01 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
Pete Lawrence captured this stunning photograph over the skies of Selsey, West Sussex, UK on October 24, 2006. He writes “Comet Swan appears to have brightened. In magnitude +5.5 skies with incoming cloud, I estimated it to be magnitude +4.6 on the evening of the 24th October - a fairly easy naked eye comet! The tail is now showing some interesting features too.”
More pics Here.
Nice!
It's the mark of the end of times.....the omen....
whoooooohhhh....whooooooooh.....
Beautiful..
Saw it tonight from my back yard. I didn't have the energy to haul the scope out, but just used some 7x50 binoculars. The tail was barely detectable, but the nucleus was easy to spot.
It's on strike? Well, at least it's environmentally friendly.
Meh.
The comet we saw while we were cruising back home on the USS PELELIU through the Indian Ocean in '95 was bigger.
Place your palms together, put them over your head and open your arms about 3.5 feet.
That was how big that comet was. I learned years later that it had some Japanese name starting with the letter, "H." But I called it my Birthday Comet since that's when it arrived.
Comet Hyakutake
http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/comet/hyakutake/
and for lots of images
http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/comet/hyakutake/images.html
So I like live in the South. What direction should I be looking tomorrow night and what time
Yep! That was the one.
It may not be viewable depending on where you live exactly.. The comet would be seen near the Corona Borealis also called the Northern Crown, http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/constellations/coronaborealis.html..
wiki has some good info as well, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_Borealis
Cool!
FYI, something to do with your new scope.
C/2006 M4 (SWAN)
JPL Small-Body Database Browser
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?ID=dK06M040;orb=1;cov=0
Classification: Hyperbolic Comet
SPK-ID: 1002407
(hyperbolic orbits I think are diagnostic of comets which are just passing through, iow, not originating in the Solar System)
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